Writing is one of the things keeping me sane. With my words, I’m weaving a home for myself. In an increasingly ugly social world, I’m trying to make myself a shelter, a hidden place to heal.
A nest, a cocoon. A chrysalis. I discovered recently that some caterpillars turning into butterflies partially liquefy in their chrysalises, that they don’t just morph from crawling caterpillar to winged creature but return to primordial slime in between: holometaboly, a true transformation.
I’m thankful I haven’t turned to slime, or been reduced to a vegetable, by this bash on the head but I have subjectively entered a more fluid state. Reality feels much stranger, with my shrunken sphere of memory, and my sense of myself is dissolving. I can only hope that my imaginal discs – containing the proto-structures for the form that will follow – remain intact. In some butterfly species, future body parts covertly take shape even in the caterpillar’s early life. Perhaps the ideas that my mind will coalesce around in future are already in development.
It’s hard to tell though. It’s hard to tell anything these days. There’s been so much discontinuity – in my mind, in my life, in the locked-down, vaccine-pushing world around me – it’s hard to keep track. Hopefully, like the metamorphosed butterfly, when I emerge I’ll retain some memory of the time before. For now, I have to bide my time, and remind myself that, although the human world is in disarray, the rest of the natural world is just carrying on. This time of retreat is temporary.
As my eight-year-old self once wrote*,
‘When I come back out again
I’ll hear the birdie’s song’.
Indeed.
*From my first published poem,’The Butterfly in a Chrysalis’, which I recently came across in an old copy of my primary school’s annual magazine.
Pontycymer, Glamorgan, South Wales
14th March 2021